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Category: 35 CR – Occupy movement

The trader John Paulson earned himself $4 billion and his funds another $15 billion in one year by betting against the housing market. For help predicting the extent of the downturn, Paulson hired none other than Alan Greenspan as an advisor to his hedge fund. The Fed chairman who encouraged the housing bubble even after it began to crash is now cashing in on the very devastation his policies created. The money did not disappear at all.

It is ironic that those police officers who are busting up the Occupy protesters are themselves victims of the same social ills the demonstrators are combating: corporate greed; the slackening of essential regulatory systems; and the abject failure of all three branches of government to safeguard civil liberties and to protect, if not provide, basic human needs like health, housing, education and more.

I was one of those kids who always pushed hard and dreamed big. I skipped a grade, was in all the right AP classes, one of 2 or 3 black student on the honor roll, and went out of state for college @ 17 and had no doubts I would make it in life. I used the government and Sallie Mae to make it through grad school within 6 years, and expected to be somewhere way different than where I am now…..

I am 25 now and living back @ home. With a different phone number to avoid all of the harrassing phone calls asking me to pay back $1400 a month I just don’t have.

It is therefore tragic to see rights of association, assembly and protest, rights guaranteed by the Constitution, trampled upon by policies formulated within the CUNY system that seem designed to deny the right to protest and to restrict the possibility for open and and pacific dialogue.

Media’s natural tendency is to sympathize with the police. They are the good guys, criminals the bad guys. And I think this is the right presumption until facts compel one to think otherwise. But I also think this habit of deference is so ingrained in the minds of journalists that even when it’s totally obvious that the cops are so completely the bad guys in a story, the media still can’t avoid false equivalency.

The mainstream media was declaring continually “OWS has no message”. Frustrated, I simply asked them. I began soliciting online “What is it you want?” answers from Occupy. In the first 15 minutes, I received 100 answers. These were truly eye-opening.

The No 1 agenda item: get the money out of politics. Most often cited was legislation to blunt the effect of the Citizens United ruling, which lets boundless sums enter the campaign process. No 2: reform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the most frequent item being to restore the Glass-Steagall Act – the Depression-era law, done away with by President Clinton, that separates investment banks from commercial banks. This law would correct the conditions for the recent crisis, as investment banks could not take risks for profit that create kale derivatives out of thin air, and wipe out the commercial and savings banks.

No 3 was the most clarifying: draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors.